Lost and found

This past weekend I attended my 40th year class reunion.   Many of those folks I had not seen in that entire time.   It was interesting. Some folks said, "Hey glad you could make it, we missed you at the 20th and the 30th reunion."  I then explained to them that even though I still live within a five mile radius of where I was born and raised they apparently could not find me.

I hate looking for things.  Lately, and I'm guessing it comes with the grey hair, it seems as though I spend more time looking for things that I want.  I realize that some of this is because I can at times, shall we say, be less than organized.  Actually, I can be good at organizing, but as I am also a flagrant multi-tasker, my personal organizing can seem a bit chaotic. And especially as I get older, I find myself wondering around looking for things.

One thing in my life that I did not have to search hard for was God. God's nature is that He wants us to find him. There is a passage in Genesis 3 where God is looking for Adam and Eve.  That little story often gets glossed over as the larger context is Adam and Eve being disobedient and paying the price for having sinned.

You see God already knew where Adam and Ever were.  He was God.  He knows everything. And the fact that Adam and Eve were hiding tells me that they knew that God might be by. That it was his custom to walk and fellowship with them. The story demonstrates God wanting to have a relationship with his  creation. We sometimes fail to realize that unlike the god that some other religions worship, the God of the Bible is not an angry God. He created mankind out of his love, he sent His Son Jesus Christ to earth to live like a man, be crucified, buried, and then raised from the dead to restore the relationship with the Father who created them.  We fail to recognize the absolute Holiness of God and so many want to stroll casually into His presence. The issue is that God's love is a genuine love, not infatuation, not a cheap love, but a love that defies human comprehension.  Only something as valuable as the One Son of God could adequately pay the price to restore the relationship that God intended.

The amazing thing about the relationship we can now have is that we can choose to love God.  Adam and Eve, up until the point they sinned knew nothing of choosing to love Him. As they had never experienced sin or evil, in their innocence God's love was all that they knew. After the fall, they, like us find ourselves given the opportunity to choose to love God. In fact 1 John 4:19 says that the only reason we can experience love or love others is because God first loved us.

So how do we find God? Jeremiah 29:13 (NIV) says "You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart." God wants us to find him. But this is not a casual or cheap relationship.  God wants us to search with our whole heart.  He wants us to be certain that this is what we truly desire.  You see only when we can choose to love, can we truly love.

Unlike that "thing" that I am looking for in my piles of clutter that cry out for either a waste bin or a professional organizer, God is there in plain site.  He only asks that we seek Him.  Some of you reading this may be seeking God, or at least you say you do.  People all of the time tell me about the personal spiritual journal they are on.  I try hard not to be critical or dismiss their efforts, but so often it is never really about them finding God as much as it is some sort of self medication as they attempt to make sense of their life.

Seek God.  Offer him your whole heart and you will find Him.

For more information on how you can find God and have a relationship with His Son Jesus Christ contact us: fpoffice@lifepointe.com.

Pastor Jeff


If you live in the Pittsburgh area please join us for worship Sunday at 11:00AM. For more information go to www.lifepointealliance.org.